Ulrich Loock

Robert Storr

Text by Robert Storr. Interview with the artist by Ulrich Loock

Al Taylor was an artist whose intimate view of the world was explored using any media available. Constantly observing whatever was around him, from pet stains on urban streets to styrofoam floats washed up on a Hawaiian beach, he deftly abstracted simple objects and imagery into a unique body of work that is both complex and humorous. Only 51 at the time of his death in 1999, the artist worked as a painter and draftsman until the mid-1980s, when he began constructing three-dimensional pieces to expand the pictorial plane. Approaching his three-dimensional work and drawing with the same whimsical intensity, he willfully dismissed any distinction between these mediums. For Taylor, his “constructions” are spatial drawings that provide a multitude of views. Each work is an investigative mapping of his thoughts and perceptions across several dimensions that configures fluid spaces through the rhythmic movement of his compositions.

Al Taylor: Early Works

Billy Sullivan

Mimi Thompson

Stanley Whitney

John Yau

Text by John Yau. Interview with Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan by Mimi Thompson

Al Taylor began his studio practice as a painter and although he is more widely known for the three-dimensional works he started making in 1985, the artist maintained that his constructions weren’t “at all about sculptural concerns; [they come] from a flatter set of traditions.” Throughout his career, whether he worked on canvas, drawings and prints, or sculpture, the creative process of Taylor’s oeuvre was fundamentally grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in spring 2017, 

 is the first book to focus exclusively on the artist’s works on canvas, featuring a selection of rarely seen paintings created between 1971 and 1980.

New scholarship by poet and art critic John Yau examines the visual relationships that connect Taylor’s paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, while also reflecting on the art world in New York City during the 1970s. In addition, a conversation conducted by Mimi Thompson between renowned painters Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan—all of whom knew Taylor well during his lifetime—provides insight into his reputation as an “artist’s artist.” Twenty-six paintings are at the heart of this catalogue—embodying the subtleties of reduction and restraint, they nonetheless have hints of the idiosyncratic playfulness that would come to characterize Taylor’s later works. In some canvases, the artist delineates spatial perspectives by incorporating the wall in shaped compositions where a single color often dominates; elsewhere, it is the interaction of his color juxtapositions and fluid paint application that energize the canvas. Both painterly and sculptural in their address, these works deviate from the usual tropes of abstraction to uniquely engage space, perception, and possess a lyrical rhythm.

This new publication reveals and validates the importance of Al Taylor’s paintings both within his own practice and in the context of twentieth-century abstraction.

Al Taylor: Early Paintings

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Andrea D'Aquino

This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.

The Story of Ruth Asawa

A Life Made by Hand

Guy Davenport

Judith Thurman

Lucas Zwirner

ekphrasis

By Guy Davenport. Contribution by Judith Thurman. Afterword by Lucas Zwirner

In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.

Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.

Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

A Balthus Notebook

Patrick Modiano

Dominique Zehrfuss

Damion Searls

Poems by Patrick Modiano. Illustrated by Dominique Zehrfuss. Translated with an introduction by Damion Searls

Published in English for the first time, 

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss.

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 

 captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.

First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

28 Paradises

Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007) was one of the most prominent abstract monochromists. Internationally admired during his life (Donald Judd was an advocate and friend), he belongs to a generation of artists whose influence has been crucial since the end of the Korean War. Both the war itself and its aftermath deeply affected the artist. In the 1970s Yun Hyong-keun joined the Dansaekhwa movement, a leading group of Korean artists whose monochromatic paintings intensively explored the effects and nature of color.

This handsomely produced volume, accompanying a major exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, offers a cornucopia of artistic and personal materials from the artist’s estate, which together provide great insight into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most important abstractionists.

Yun Hyong-keun (Palazzo Fortuny)

Spanning the most important era of his life, from the painful formative years of his early adolescence to the fame and fortune of his adulthood, this collection of personal correspondences sheds light on the artistic development, bitter struggle, and ultimate triumph of the greatest cartoonist of the twentieth century. A powerful literary view into the mind of an artistic genius, and an entertaining read even for those few not familiar with the cartooning giant's work. It's Crumb's sketchbook of words, featuring tons of great art, including entire letters done in cartoon form!

Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me: Robert Crumb Letters 1958–1977

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

Texts by Maikoio Alley Barnes, Helen Molesworth, Henry Taylor, and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

This catalogue is published by the Frye Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition 

Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum

. Celebrating the life and legacy of painter, curator, and visionary artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), 

 places Davis’ work in the context of an ongoing visual dialogue with his elder brother, artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. The catalogue features essays by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, curator of the exhibition; Helen Molesworth, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Henry Taylor, Davis’ friend and fellow artist; and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director emerita of the Frye Art Museum. The catalogue contains rich reproductions of the paintings, installations, sculptural, and filmic works in the exhibition. 

is a celebration of black culture, spirituality, and creative legacy.

Foreword by Bartomeu Marí. Texts by Kim Inhye, Oh Gwangsu, Kim Hyunsook, and Choi Jongtae

This catalogue is published with an exhibition of work by Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. One of the leading figures of the Dansaekhwa art movement, Yun’s paintings are inspired by nature, combining a palette of umber and ultramarine (the colors of earth and water) to create rectilinear compositions which are reminiscent of traditional ink-wash paintings. The investigation into flatness, materiality, and meditation in art-making is a consistent focus of his work, and his paintings characterize the elements of tactility, spirituality, and performance common to first-generation Dansaekwha artists.

Yun Hyong-keun (MMCA)

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Wolfgang Tillmans: There were 30 years between 1943 and 1973. 30 years from 1973 was the year 2003.

1. Hamburg Süd part 1
2. MMMMM aah
3. Hamburg Süd part 2
4. HaHaHaHa
5. Hamburg Süd part 3
6. Nee IYaow eow eow
7. Hamburg Süd part 4
8. EEEEEEEhh
9. Hamburg Süd part 5
10. Device Control (intro)
11. Hamburg Süd part 6

12. It's Completely Changed
13. Throw A View
14. Mmmmeehh
15. Hihihi hee
16. Soda Streatm
17. Overdub (calm to chaos Jul28)
18. Morning Return
19. Make It Up As You Go Along
20. Device Control

Wolfgang Tillmans: Hamburg Süd / Nee IYaow eow eow

Leslie Jamison

Spotlight Series

Text by William Shakespeare. Artwork by Marcel Dzama. Introduction by Leslie Jamison

Set in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s 

is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds.

, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect that appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality.

As the second title in David Zwirner Books’s 

series, this book revisits this ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.

William Shakespeare × Marcel Dzama: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Fred Moten

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Illustrated by Chris Ofili. Introduction by Fred Moten

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in 

 the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

Dialogues:
The David Zwirner Podcast
Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

 in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

Bruce Wagner

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 

. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

William Eggleston: 2¼

Jarrett Earnest

The most comprehensive portrait of art criticism ever assembled, as told by the leading writers of our time.

In the last fifty years, art criticism has flourished as never before. Moving from niche to mainstream, it is now widely taught at universities, practiced in newspapers, magazines, and online, and has become the subject of debate by readers, writers, and artists worldwide.

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

 offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. These thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic as it has evolved from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike. John Ashbery recalls finding Rimbaud’s poetry through his first gay crush at sixteen; Rosalind Krauss remembers stealing the design of October from Massimo Vignelli; Paul Chaat Smith details his early days with Jimmy Durham in the American Indian Movement; Dave Hickey talks about writing country songs with Waylon Jennings; Michele Wallace relives her late-night and early-morning interviews with James Baldwin; Lucy Lippard describes confronting Clement Greenberg at a lecture; Eileen Myles asserts her belief that her negative review incited the Women’s Action Coalition; and Fred Moten recounts falling in love with Renoir while at Harvard.

Jarrett Earnest’s wide-ranging conversations with critics, historians, journalists, novelists, poets, and theorists—each of whom approach the subject from unique positions—illustrate different ways of writing, thinking, and looking at art.

 Hilton Als, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Yve-Alain Bois, Huey Copeland, Holland Cotter, Douglas Crimp, Darby English, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Dave Hickey, Siri Hustvedt, Kellie Jones, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Molly Nesbit, Jed Perl, Barbara Rose, Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl, Barry Schwabsky, Paul Chaat Smith, Roberta Smith, Lynne Tillman, Michele Wallace, and John Yau.

Interviews with Art Critics

What it Means to Write About Art 

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Marlene Dumas. Photo by Photo by Merlijn Doomernik

Hafid Bouazza

Marlene Dumas

By William Shakespeare. Translated by Hafid Bouazza. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

 (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s 

. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.

Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.

The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.

Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.

Venus & Adonis

Okwui Enwezor

Interview with the artist by Okwui Enwezor

Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture.

, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential artists working with photography today, Ruff has redefined the medium’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as a means for visual experience. He has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital technologies, and culling imagery from scientific archives, print media, and the internet.

Presented here is a selection of Ruff’s most well-known works, as well as the newer 

 series, begun in 2018, which draws on negatives of India and Burma taken in the 1850s by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an officer in the East India Company. Also included is a conversation between Ruff and Okwui Enwezor, which took place at Haus der Kunst in Munich, in connection with the artist’s retrospective then on view. The conversation, published here for the first time, has been edited for this volume and examines Ruff’s artistic practice and inspiration, serving as an engaging and dynamic introduction to the artist.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

 and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

Thomas Ruff: Transforming Photography (Bilingual)

Langston Hughes

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Photographs by Roy DeCarava. Text by Langston Hughes. Afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava

“The people in these photographs had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take their photographs without any self-consciousness.” —Roy DeCarava

 is a “poem” about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This renowned, life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city.

Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in 

, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (hardcover)

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Peter Poplaski

 is a concise and beautifully designed overview of Crumb’s remarkable career, presented in chronological order. The 250-page volume compiles material from five decades of work and features hundreds of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and covers as well as rare photographs of the artist and never-seen-before sketchbook work. Each of the 15 chapters is introduced by Crumb who contributes handwritten autobiographical anecdotes. It is a must-have for any Crumb collector.

The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book

Nominated for three 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: From Creation to the death of Joseph, here are all 50 chapters of the Book of Genesis, revealingly illustrated as never before.

Envisioning the first book of the bible like no one before him, R. Crumb, the legendary illustrator, reveals here the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Originally thinking that he would do a take off of Adam and Eve, Crumb became so fascinated by the Bible’s language, “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions,” that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible.

Now, readers of every persuasion—Crumb fans, comic book lovers, and believers—can gain astonishing new insights from these harrowing, tragic, and even juicy stories. Crumb’s 

 reintroduces us to the bountiful tree lined garden of Adam and Eve, the massive ark of Noah with beasts of every kind, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by brimstone and fire that rained from the heavens, and the Egypt of the Pharaoh, where Joseph’s embalmed body is carried in a coffin, in a scene as elegiac as any in Genesis. Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretation that have often obscured the Bible’s most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of Biblical originals: from the serpent in Eden, the humanoid reptile appearing like an alien out of a science fiction movie, to Jacob, a “kind’ve depressed guy who doesn’t strike you as physically courageous,” and his bother, Esau, “a rough and kick ass guy,” to Abraham’s wife Sarah, more fetching than most woman at 90, to God himself, “a standard Charlton Heston-like figure with long white hair and a flowing beard.”

As Crumb writes in his introduction, “the stories of these people, the Hebrews, were something more than just stories. They were the foundation, the source, in writing of religious and political power, handed down by God himself.” Crumb’s

, the culmination of 5 years of painstaking work, is a tapestry of masterly detail and storytelling which celebrates the astonishing diversity of the one of our greatest artistic geniuses.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

An installation view of the exhibition, Suzan Frecon: recent paintings, oil and water, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2022.

Joachim Pissarro

 at David Zwirner in fall of 2010, this beautifully designed and produced catalogue — with a text by noted curator and art historian Joachim Pissarro — features Suzan Frecon’s most recent large-scale oil paintings, along with newly commissioned color photography of exhibition and studio installation views, as well as the artist’s notebooks and sketches. Also included is the facsimile of a personal letter to the artist from poet Clark Coolidge.

Suzan Frecon: paintings 2006–2010

Alexander Alberro

Nora M. Alter

Serge Guilbaut

Sven Lütticken

Jesse Proudfoot

Texts by Nora M. Alter, Serge Guilbaut, Sven Lütticken, and Jesse Proudfoot. Interview with the artist by Alexander Alberro

 is a 44-foot mural installation by Stan Douglas on permanent display at The Woodward Complex in Vancouver. This beautifully designed monograph takes an in-depth look into this monumental work that depicts a staged reenactment of a violent event in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Gastown Riot, as it came to be known, was the culmination of mounting tensions between the city’s counterculture and police following weeks of drug-related arrests. Thousands of people had gathered in a peaceful “smoke-in” protest in the Gastown district, before police in riot gear broke up the event using batons, horses, and dogs to disperse the protesters. Douglas’s meticulous recreation captures the ensuing mayhem with its general atmosphere of confusion and panic. This monograph features essays by Nora M. Alter, Serge Guilbaut, Sven Lütticken, and Jesse Proudfoot and an interview with the artist by Alexander Alberro. Also included are supplementary works from Douglas’s 

 series and archival photographs of the Gastown Riot.

Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971

Christian Viveros-Fauné

In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, 

 illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art

, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s 

 (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s 

 and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s 

 (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with.


Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, 

 delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art 

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Paul Chan

Christophe Cherix

Tacita Dean

Barbara Engelbach

Mark Godfrey

Stefan Gronert

Kathy Halbreich

Rachel Jans

Erhard Klein

Jutta Koether

Christine Mehring

Matthias Mühling

Marcelle Polednik

Christian Rattemeyer

Kathrin Rottmann

Magnus Schaefer

Lanka Tatersall

Texts by Paul Chan, Christophe Cherix, Tacita Dean, Barbara Engelbach, Mark Godfrey, Stefan Gronert, Kathy Halbreich, Rachel Jans, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Christine Mehring, Matthias Mühling, Marcelle Polednik, Christian Rattemeyer, Kathrin Rottmann, Magnus Schaefer, and Lanka Tattersall. Bibliography by Erhard Klein. Interview with the artist by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Working across an unusually broad range of media, including painting, photography, film, drawing, and sculpture, Sigmar Polke is widely regarded as one of the most influential and experimental artists of the post-war generation. His irreverent wit and promiscuous intelligence, coupled with his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, provided the foundation for his punishing critiques of the conventions of art history and social behavior. Experimenting wildly with materials and tools as varied as meteor dust and the xerox machine, Polke made work of both an intimate and monumental scale, drawn from sources as diverse as newspaper headlines and Dürer prints. Polke avoided any one signature style, a fluid method best defined by the word “alibi,” which means “in or at another place.” This also is a reminder of the deflection of responsibility which shaped German behavior during the Nazi period, compelling Polke’s generation to reinvent the role of the artist. Published in conjunction with 

, the first exhibition to encompass the artist’s work across all media, this richly illustrated publication provides an overview of his cross-disciplinary innovations and career. Essays by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern; and a range of scholars and artists examine the full range of Polke’s exceptionally inventive oeuvre and place his enormous skepticism of all social, political and artistic conventions against German history.

Sigmar Polke: Alibis 1963–2010

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